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What do eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.com have in common? They're all applications that integrate large databases with the Web. The popularity (and power) of these applications stems from their accessibility and usability: thousands of users can access the same data at the same time without theneed to install any additional software on their computers.Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQLoffersweb developers a mixture of theoretical and practical information on creating web database applications. Using PHP, and MySQL, two open source technologies that are often combined to develop web applications, the book offers detailed information on designing relational databases and on web application architecture, both of which will be useful to readers who have never dealt with these issues before. The book also introduces Hugh and Dave's OnlineWines, a complete (but fictional) online retail site that allows users to browse, search a database, add items to a shopping cart, manage their membership, and purchase wines. Using this site as an example, the book shows you how to implement searching and browsing, store user data, validate user input, manage transactions, and maintain security.If you want to build small to medium-scale web database applications that can run on modest hardware and process more than a million hits a day from users, this book will show you how.

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Web Database Applications shows Web developers how to build rich Web database applications using two leading open-source technologies, PHP and MySQL. The authors also assume use of the Apache Web server, which is by far the most common PHP scenario. Both PHP and MySQL are introduced from scratch, although this is a fast-paced book best suited to at least intermediate developers.

After a brief discussion of Web database applications, the authors offer a rapid tour of PHP essentials, including loops, expressions, functions and common mistakes. Next comes a quick-start guide to MySQL, focusing mainly on the SQL language itself. The following chapters tackle connecting to MySQL and other databases, implementing user-driven queries and enabling writing as well as reading data. There is a useful chapter on data validation, both on the client and the server and excellent coverage of another crucial subject: security and authentication. This looks at the fundamentals of HTTP authentication and examines security features in both Apache and PHP, identifying weaknesses and explaining pros and cons. The closing chapters form a detailed case study, an online wine store, with complete code available for download. It embraces user management, a shopping cart, searching, ordering and delivery, covering many key topics in the process. At the back of the book are appendices on a range of issues, including installation, Web protocols, database modelling and session management.

Web Database Applications is tightly-focused, packing in lots of solid technical information without wasting words. It does not pretend to cover all the potential uses of PHP, and the screen shots will not win prizes for design, but it's a great handbook for building robust, secure database applications with these popular technologies. --Tim Anderson

Review

"As symbolized by the duck-billed platypus on the cover it is a book that will help you to survive in a rapidly changing world. Submerge yourself in proven technology and emerge unscathed once the dots have fallen out by the wayside. Recommended for its excellent examples which will save you thousands in case you need to develop a similar application." Information Security Bulletin, July 2002 "The book manages to deliver on two levels at once - the concepts, planning and design process as well as implementation. It's also surprisingly well written, and manages not to be too smug or patronizing." - Nick Veitch, LinuxFormat, October 2002

Most helpful customer reviews

Web Database Applications by H.E. Williams and D. Lane is a truly wonderful book if you are looking to learn how to get an online database application up and running fast. The book eases you into PHP with a decent length chapter on the basic syntax of the language, followed by an introduction of MySQL.After that, each chapter will teach you new techniques which are instantly applicable to a real-world online database system. Among others this book will teach you how to: write scripts that interact with MySQL, deal with security issues, handle sessions, handle shopping carts and lots lots more.The book was written before the introduction of PHP 4.2, so certain 4.2 (and up) specific issues are not covered. However, most of the examples in the book have been re-written for use with 4.2 and can be downloaded freely. On top of this the authors supply a level of support that is all but unheard of. Every question that I asked was answered within 1 day if not within the same day.All in all this book is at the top of it's league, I can highly recommend it!

Like others I've found this text an absolute corker for getting started with on-line databases.However, after struggling with one of the examples for several hours I was disappointed to finally realise that the code was woefully short.Just in case, I thought, I'll check the book's web site for errata, and found several pages of it! Some of which contains errors, like wrong page number!!!!!I don't know about you but I find it hard to learn new stuff when the examples don't work.Well I finally got the code to work and I've submitted it to the publishers. But, whilst I'm quite an experienced developer, I've only been looking at PHP, MySQl & Java for a couple of weeks and presumably it takes longer to write a book.So how come the readers are fixing the authors code?Maybe I should write a book ...Was going to give 4* but because of the errors went down to 3.

I am a well versed programmer who has read many programming books by many different authors. If you are a person who learns by visual do not get this book. Here are some of the pitfalls of this book.1. They throw globs of code at you and do not explain what any of it is doing. You have to figure it out for yourself.2. This book is not a step by step book for beginners, you will get lost.3. The name and the reviews fooled me. This book is not for the beginner who would like to advance into the subject of creating Dynamic web sites.If anyone knows of a good book on the subject of creating dynamic web sites using php, and that is very visual and in a step by step format please let me know.

Serving up dynamic content with scripting applications is all the rage now in the website development world. These scripting applications can provide customized information pages, shopping carts and content-management systems, and user-influenced web experiences. While "old-fashioned" static sites and pages still have their place, dynamic content sites are becoming more and more prevalent, primarily due to their obvious advantages, but also to their modest costs. The reason for these low costs is because the software applications are generally free, thanks to the open-source movement. Apache is an open-source web server application widely used. The most prevalent and preferred scripting application is PHP; MySQL is the predominant database management program. These three drive the great increase in dynamic content web development. While essentially free, their installation, configuration, and use requires some technical and programming skills and knowledge, but small and medium-size database-driven web sites can be managed by those not expert in programming or database management. While there is a lot of material available on the Internet about this software and database-driven sites, and a number of books available on these topics, none is as thorough and complete as "Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL", by Hugh E. Williams and David Lane. This volume is in its 2nd edition and is a 2004 publication of O'Reilly Media Inc. The book presents an overview of dynamic web sites using open-source software and relates the principles behind generating dynamic content with database applications. The focus is on PHP, the scripting language, and MySQL, the database management software. As befits a couple of university-associated authors, the book reads much like a college textbook.Read more ›

As the title indicates, this book is all about building websites powered by database applications. The book uses PHP and MySQL for a scripting language and a database technology respectively. Familiarity with programming and computers is assumed but other than that, not much else is assumed. The authors do an excellent job of explaining some of the fundamental concepts underlying database driven websites. All this is done in simple terms without too much jargon. To top it all off, a tutorial style approach is taken to illustrate how all these concepts come together. The tutorial is on building an online retail site that sells wines. The sample code used in the book can be downloaded from the publisher's website.PHP is a powerful language that is open source and that can be used in lieu of Java and .NET technologies for many web applications that aren't too complex. For most small business owners, this should suffice. I am not too sure about using it in large corporations. This is one of the most popular open source technology along with Linux and MySQL.MySQL is an open source database that can be used instead of SQL Server, Access, or Oracle. Once again, when the database application gets complex, I am not confident of its ability to handle the complexity. This is also excellent for small businesses but not large corporations.There are about 13 chapters and 5 appendices spanning 550 pages starting with an introduction to database applications and the web, continuing with an intro to PHP and MySQL, covering the main concepts behind web technologies and ending with the sample wine store application. The main concepts discussed are querying databases, writing to databases, validations on the server and client, session management, user authentication and security.Read more ›